The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found...

Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars...

The cost of repairing and replacing equipment and developing new war-fighting materiel has exploded. In the first year of the invasion, such costs totaled $2.4 billion, then rose to $5.2 billion in 2004. This year, they will hit $26 billion, and could go as high as $30 billion.

I now understand what Jack Murtha meant when he said in our interview last winter: "I told all the [defense contractor] CEOs this — I said fellas let me just tell you how it's going to work. You're not going to have money for new equipment. There's only like five ships in the budget this year. You're going to have to rehabilitate equipment. That's the business you better get in."